Background

BIOGRAPHY

Casey Chalem Anderson is a Greenwich Village native who passionately creates oil paintings of and inspired by the Hamptons landscape and its natural forms. Casey splits her time between Sag Harbor and New York City, immersing herself in both natural and urban artistic worlds.

As a child growing up in New York City, Casey’s parents took her to Greenwich Village poetry readings, gallery openings, dance recitals, avant-garde theater presentations and museums. She began to paint seriously at the High School of Art and Design, N.Y.C., also studying figure drawing at the Art Students League. She graduated from University of California at Berkeley with a B.A. in Art, where she studied with Joan Brown, Elmer Bischoff, Christopher Brown, James Cahill, and other prominent Bay area artists and art historians.

Casey participates in Hamptons benefits like the Cigar Box Art Auction for the East End Hospice and the Annual Studio Benefit Tour of the Artist Alliance of East Hampton. Casey also helped to create Plein Air Peconic, an independent artist group that works with the Peconic Land Trust to protect the land and water that is so essential to her paintings. She helps produce the group’s annual art exhibitions and coordinates painting outings at conserved sites.

Casey can often be found at the beach, observing the changes in time, color, and weather, which manifest on her canvases as a balance between tranquility and visual stimulation. Her paintings are collected by those who wish to access that serenity and the emotional lift of color that her work so uniquely offers. The colors motivate her to create this parallel world in paint. These pieces are a creative interpretation of the ocean, where the artist feels most grounded.

At the same time, Casey engages with New York City’s own landscape, attending gallery, museum, and cultural events. Much like the Hamptons, the city art community provides an important creative foundation. Casey’s art is consistently informed by her surroundings, be it the quiet rhythm of the beach or the activity in the city. Casey’s newest works are an abstract series that use the colors of her Hamptons palette in novel, abstract forms that connect, but also inform, her realist works.

Statement

ARTIST STATEMENT

I paint the coastal setting of the Hamptons where the land intersects with an expanse of water. Nature’s changing colors ignite my senses. With my brush, I use shapes to mark and divide the composition’s surface. With the major surface areas established, I am free to experiment. My spare, clean style exudes spaciousness, giving viewers air to breathe. I use drawings and photographs to remind me of key proportions, but in the studio the possibilities of the paint fascinate me. The sapphire, teal, and cerulean of my palette creates a positive emotional charge, in the curve of a wave and in the arc of a round form.

New works steer away from literal realism, settling on geometric and minimal forms. My abstract pieces cull from my many years as a landscape painter and rely on my memory of the seaside. Currently, I split my time between natural and urban space. For me, abstract paintings denote innovation, where painting is distilled to the basic elements: shape, color, form, and texture. The tricks of illusion are removed and the viewer can move into an ethereal space where forms are not necessarily recognizable.

In all of my works, realist and abstract, I strive to instill a peaceful and expansive sensation. In the city, I am informed by the stark contrast of life lived on concrete, just as I am informed by the natural forms of moving water in the Hamptons.